One January night in 2008 when V and I were in Taipei, we had to cross a major intersection near the Zhongshan metro station via an underpass. When we reached the below-ground level at the bottom of the stairs where the ramps from the four street corners met, we spotted a sad looking busker sitting in a corner playing a mandolin. He had a dreary, hoarse voice that was in strong constrast with the sweet, insistent strumming of his instrument. The song was full of melancholy and resignation, with a sense of longing only rekindled in the chorus.

A few nights later towards the end of one of our epic shopping and sightseeing expeditions (or it might have been when we once again got lost looking for that elusive vegetarian café in Tianjin Street), we happened to walk through the underpass again. The busker was there, playing the same sad song. I wondered if he had only a narrow repertory or if he somehow knew that this was the only song suitable for a grey, wet and opaque winter night. We passed on, and I thought no more about it.

On a weekend day a month or so ago when winter had finally set in around Melbourne, V and I went into the CBD. Wandering along Bourke Street, I insisted we buy yet another Mandopop karaoke compilation. I argued that singing along would help me learn to read Chinese characters, but in reality my principal motivation was that I liked a lot of the songs. I have often found it somehow endearing and reassuring how badly some of them are sung. If these singers can do what they do so poorly, yet be successful, then so can I.

Back home, as we watched the new collection, V skipped through several tracks that fell into the usual irritating categories: the ones with a song played over the wrong video clip, the ones with still photography or very primitive animation rather than moving images and the ones sung by dull, anonymous boybands with too many members.  All too soon, V sannounced, ‘This is the last track.’

Chen Chu Sheng: melancholy, stay awhile

A quiet acoustic guitar sequence began to play over still images of a young pop idol. Just as I was about to complain that this was yet another of those MVs with just stills, a filmed section began. It featured the same handsome, painfully thin youth, austerely clad in jeans and a white shirt, carrying a guitar case. He sang verses quietly in a strong but harsh voice. Finally, as he reached a chorus full of desolation, he posed against high rise blocks of grey flats with low ceilings that looked like honeycombs of claustrophobia, and later among weedy deserted blocks awating their turn to be engulfed by imminent urban sprawl. Or later still, he leaned against a chain link fence above a freeway choked with cars that seemed to stretch back to an invisible far horizon. ‘You mei you ren ceng gao su ni, wo he ai ni,’ he sang: Has anyone told you I love you very much? He sang mournfully as if expecting the answer no, no one has ever told me.

‘It’s that song,’ said V. ‘The song from the underpass, remember? The one the busker with the mandolin sang.’

I soon found out that the singer on the MV was Chen Chu Sheng. Born in Guangdong province, he had grown up in Hainan. ‘Maybe that’s why the song was so popular when I was in Guangzhou,’ commented V.

When I revisited the clip on YouTube, I became caught up in the story of the song: not the real story, which I think is about a footloose wanderer in search of warmer weather, who addresses the girlfriend he has left behind, but an imagined story. I thought it was about someone like Chu Sheng who lived in one of those flats and had fallen for a girl, but his affections were requited only with ambiguity. It seemed impossible that love, however troubled, could ever spring forth in such a setting, but it had. At the same time, those scenes of rampant urbanisation had become a backdrop for universal feelings of chronic, low grade loss.

So here’s the view from Neveridol: listen to this song in winter, then go and buy the EP. I came to it late and by accident, but I still remember it. 

Sources:  In 2008, E. E. Media brought out an album, 13,  featuring the finalists in a singing competition, with Has Anyone Told You? on it and later an EP by Chen Chu Sheng called I‘m actually not alone along the way 原来我一直都不孤单 in which the song also featured. Chen has since parted ways with the company. See also his Wikipedia entry.